Brand Mascots Have Been “Cringe” For Years. Now They’re Back, Fronting AUNZ’s “Most Fun Work”

Despite being one of the most effective marketing tools alongside the jingle, brand mascots have fallen out of fashion in recent years – until now. New Zealand brand The Warehouse has revived its kiwi after a 20-year hiatus, Donut King has turned a product into a hip-shaking ambassador, and Ogilvy Australia is on a mission to convince Aussie brands to reinvest in brand characters.

​Ogilvy Australia studied the phenomenon of the mascot’s decline in ‘The Character Advantage’ white paper, analysing every Effie Gold winner from 2021 to 2025 to find out of 20 campaigns, only one was built around a memorable, recurring brand character.

And an audit of the YouTube Ads Leaderboard for Australia over the last 24 months showed only one in 20 ads featuring a brand character.

​Fran Clayton, Ogilvy Australia and New Zealand’s chief strategy officer, told LBB she has a theory as to why brands have moved away from characters.

“Maybe we went through a little bit of cringe. They weren't modern enough with the rise of digital and innovative new ways of going to market. We're obsessed with utility, we're obsessed with innovation, and I think we lost sight of some of these simple but incredibly powerful techniques.

“Brand characters are not cringe or unimaginative. Some of the most fun work that we're seeing in different markets is leaning back into them.”

​Kiely Decker, head thinker at Thinkerbell, told LBB a mascot “gives a brand permission to show up as a living character” and acts as a “ genuine vehicle to deliver real brand messages.”

In the agency’s most recent work for Donut King, Thinkerbell revived a legacy asset and turned the iconic Donut Buddy into a mascot. Importantly, Kiely said, he “isn't just a static icon that sits neatly locked-up next to the logo – he's found his voice, he's shaking his hips, and he's actively doing the heavy lifting for the brand, taking us on whatever journey we need him to go on: from new product launches to retail offers to partnership and collaborations.”

In New Zealand, The Warehouse chose to resurrect its long-lost Kiwi mascot after a 20-year absence, waking it from a coma via a five-part episodic series created by TBWA. Kiwi’s return was complete with missing person posters and a hotline that generated more than 100 public tips.

​Frankie Coulter, chief marketing officer, told LBB the brand was “tapping into the past in order to have a better future”. He joined from Goodman Fielder at the start of the year, and one of his first moves was pausing marketing spend for eight weeks to test what was working. Now, within the space of a few weeks, he has awoken the Kiwi, and rolled out an ambitious brand platform, ‘This is Warehouse Country’, to drive a business-wide transformation.

“We've got some really strong distinctive brand assets, the Kiwi is just one of them – the other one is our jingle. We had kids’ trollies back in the day, and the sausage sizzle in New Zealand way before Bunnings.

“Unfortunately, we stepped away from all of those things. The Kiwi just became less relevant, the jingle disappeared, our strap line was getting used less in all of our communications.

“We just weren't using all of that. And when you asked people, ‘what do you think of The Warehouse?’ they would just list all of those things.”

The difference between a character that simply exists and a mascot that connects with people is “a little bit of personality” and “a clear role for your mascot,” Frankie said.

“The best mascots around the world have a role in the brand, a role in the business, and a role in connecting with their customer. Our Kiwi, he is the champion of our business. He's the champion of our customers in terms of the community aspect. Our Kiwi back in the day and now, he used to show up at things like Christmas parades, summer fests, or the openings to things. The Kiwi is our way of connecting with our population and our community, wherever our stores are.”

Whilst Fran said mascots are “really effective across categories,” she added they are particularly helpful “when you’ve got no physical products.”

“The shape of a Coke bottle is instantly recognisable, but it’s so much harder if you're selling an insurance policy or a phone plan,” she said.

Ogilvy client, bank ING, has invested in a lion called Roary. Previously created using CGI, a September 2025 campaign featuring Roary was fully animated using AI through WPP Production and WPP Open, cutting costs down to a fifth of the original price.

The technology means “you can now create a lion for a fraction of the cost that you used to be able to,” said Fran.

“It's not just about taking the cost down, it's then, how can we reinvest that budget to use the character in more moments? Before, it would have been far too expensive to bring the lion into a CEO's letter to shareholders. But now you can, and you can then bring the brand into [the] experience so much more fully.”

While some mascots are more recent creations, others, like the Tooheys Stag, have endured for over a century. With Thinkerbell also the custodians of Tooheys’ creative, Kiely said, “for both Tooheys Stag and Donut Buddy, the underlying strategy is the same.”

“We aren’t asking people to learn something completely new, we’re just tapping into recognition they already have, which makes refreshing a legacy asset more effective than investing years in building new brand equity from scratch.”

For brands that already have a mascot, it’s not enough to only use them in advertising. “Give them the run of the house,” Fran said.

“When you've got a character that's just stuck in advertising and it doesn't turn up in the product experience, or the service experience, or in activation, then you're almost relegating it to being this narrow advertising thing rather than a true part of a brand experience.”